Time()Pieces

“Each cycle slips out of memory as if the body refuses to realize that it's hearing the same beat every time.”
Kodwo Eshun

“If only we never said goodbye to the fundamentals
and questioned our fathers when they fled at knife point.
May poetry and God’s name have mercy on us!
We saw our future just behind our windows.
To reach it, we broke through the walls of our present,
and it became a past in the shield of an ancient shoulder.”
Mahmoud Darwish

Over five days, this group will study a selection of texts and work through a variety of temporal circuitries. Each session invites participants to think-with open questions concerning a particular “piece” of the modalities of time. Jason Mohaghegh will begin our week-long dérive with an exposition of ‘chronomania’ and ‘chronocide’ in Middle Eastern writing, exploring the ways in which these outsider temporalities express themselves through different conceptual personae (i.e. the timescape of the madman, the prisoner, the martyr, the barbarian, the wanderer, the traitor, the seducer, the machine, the visionary, and the exile). This will set the stage for a pair of sessions extending the general problematic of decolonizing time along forked (but complementary) paths, investigating the pre-conditions of temporality on one hand, and the (im)possibilities of a universalist time on the other. Some of the questions we hope to broach include problems around ‘universal history’, its pact with eschatology; the transcendental production of time; standardization and temporal objectivity; modernity and transmodernity. From here the focus spirals wildly outwards to the twisted temporalities of what might be named a ‘gothic futurism’. Contemporary Chinese science fiction will provide the launchpad for an examination of the relationships between technology, suspicion, and temporal lag that place the human species as a whole in the position of alien subject within a speculative cosmic coloniality.

\\|// will play the role of hosts, providing textual extracts – from Frantz Fanon, Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Fred Moten, Donna Haraway, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Anna Greenspan, Liu Cixin and others – alongside perturbations of them, to lead an evolving conversation that will take us everywhen and erewhon.

Mit \\|// (Lendl Barcelos, Amy Ireland,Katrina Burch, Matt Hare, Ben Woodard) & Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh